Always wondered why it doesn’t make sense to use diesel/electric in large trucks. Assumed it’s because cost/complexity doesn’t out weight benefits, but not sure why. Thanks.
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A typical modern car has about 100 horse power per ton. A tractor trailer has about 10 hp per ton that it’s moving. A train locomotive is lucky if it has 1 horse power per ton. The transmission on a modern car has typically has 4-6 gears. A tractor trailer needs a much larger transmission with lots more gears. Typically 12 – 16. And because it’s pulling more, each of those gears needs to be bigger and heavier. So it still scales but it becomes less efficient. By the time you get to a locomotive, if you wanted to have a normal transmission it would need still more gears and they would have to be much bigger and heavier still. So it’s worth it to do something different that is less efficient in general but scales up much better. And that’s converting the kinetic energy into electricity and then driving them using electric motors which doesn’t need a transmission at all.
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